This is an edited version of a lightning talk presented at the New Zealand Conservators of Cultural Materials conference, Wellington 17-19 October 2016. I will first explain the logical, if somewhat tenuous, connection of this paper with the book – Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World. It is a […]
The AICCM Objects and Electron Special Interest Groups presented their joint symposium “The Shock of the New: Modern Materials, Media and Methods” on the 8th, 9th and 10th of February, and given the location at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, it was a great opportunity to enjoy a conservation conference close to home. The […]
In late February, the National Council held its Face-to-Face planning session at Museum Victoria. This meeting, held over a Friday and Saturday, is always a stimulating, enlightening, tiring and gratifying affair. Not only is it a chance to put a face to a voice (all other meetings throughout the year are held as teleconferences) but […]
ACT National Library of Australia Treatment projects The team has been enthusiastically sharing the skills knowledge gained from the conference and applying it to collection material – for example repairing glass plate negatives and fibre analysis. We are also excited to be working with our Photography team to use Reflected Transformation Imaging (RTI) to closely […]
Shandong Province and South Australia have been sister provinces since 3 April 1986. With the ever-growing friendship between the two provinces, institutional cooperative relationships in a wide range of fields have been established. In 2015, the three cultural institutions of Shandong Museum, History South Australia and Artlab Australia signed an Agreement to enhance the exchange […]
My entire professional career has existed within the era of the Commonwealth ‘efficiency dividends’, which were reported on in the last AICCM eNews.1 These are effectively an annual budget cut, and have been the state of play for Commonwealth agencies for nearly 30 years.2 My sense of conservation and the cultural sector more widely has […]
The Materials Conservation Department at the Western Australian Museum (WAM) recently conserved and analysed artefacts collected in the 1890s by Australian missionary George Herbert Jose, while he was working in the Zhejiang province, China. They include a scroll, skirt, belt, collar, hats, shoes, origami book, as well as a bible and prayer book. The majority […]
Professor John Mulvaney died in September of last year.1 Often referred to as the “father of Australian archaeology”, many may not be aware that he also played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Australian conservation profession. Founder of the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology and an active campaigner for the […]
What first attracted you to conservation as a profession and how did you get started in the field? I was actually studying Maritime Archaeology at Flinders University when I first realised Conservation was a profession. Vicki Richards and Jon Carpenter (conservators from the WA Museum), taught one of the intensive subjects, and it was like […]